We asked Axel Schultze, leader of the project to tell us what he is aiming to achieve:

The overarching objective of the project is to stimulate small and medium size businesses and innovative start-ups across the EU leveraging social media to create a sustainable growth, additional jobs and being able to compete in a global market. Specifically we want to double the number of businesses, who grew their revenue and added new jobs by leveraging social media, year over year till 2016.

We seek new ways for a more stable European Union and like to make business leaders and entrepreneurs aware of the opportunities Social Media holds and help them to apply it in a professional and pleasant way.The first few steps of the current DA12 Social project were orchestrated with smart, highly skilled and very motivated people. With nearly no administrative overhead and a leadership style of the social media age, executives, manager, business development people and social media consultants worked all hands on deck together. Autonomous work groups achieved in only two weeks what traditional consulting teams hardly complete in several months.

This is an ambitious project – how long will it take?

The project life span is expected to be from fall 2012 until end of 2016. Teams in every EU country will work with country officials, collaborate with chambers of commerce and related government groups to help SMEs leverage social media to thrive. The teams will be between 10 and 100 people working in the respective industries or geographies by country – making it a total of approximately 500 engaged mostly part time people in the project. Funds will be sought from many sources, possibly in part from sponsoring industry leaders. We will build a scalable finance model to ensure relative success by 2016 – meaning even if underfunded we will demonstrate partial success.

So what does success look like?

Success is if any of the team members can motivate 25 companies each quarter to leverage social media to grow their export and hire additional employees to do so. Over the course of the next 4 years success is if the team of 500 was able to help 200,000 companies across Europe to grow plus 200,000 who basically learned on their own. If those companies hire just 5 additional people, we created 2 million additional jobs.”